Walk Right By Those White Mushrooms!

"When you're in the grocery store, folks, don't pick up the white mushrooms! Get oysters, or chantarelles, or morels! Don't buy yellow onions! Get shallots, red onions, white onions."

We're supposed to change it up. The kids in the class need directions to the grocery store closest to campus. It's got to be hard for some of them to practice cutting and cooking. It's part of my daily life. Chef says "If there's a day I don't cook, I feel like there's something wrong." They look at him with big eyes.

We took the safety certification quiz today — basically the same as yesterday's test but 30% longer. Don't have to carry that heavy book to class every day anymore, which is a pleasure. There's no book for food science, just a printout of the Chef's powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but the science seems rudimentary. I guess if that was your interest, you'd be going in a different direction.

We finished up sauces today, and now we know how to make all five of the mother, I mean PRIMARY, sauces. Today we made tomato and bechamel. To review: the five are veloute (stock+roux), espagnole (enriched stock), bechamel (milk+roux), hollandaise (egg+butter), and tomato. We've learned to make each one "plain", because they are all meant to serve as bases for variations, which will then be more highly seasoned. For example, tomato sauce starts with diced bacon, carrots and onions, with stock and then "tomato products" added, then reduced. The resulting sauce is pureed, then strained, and ours was a far cry tastier than the tomato sauce you'd buy in a can, but still relatively bland. To make marinara, you'd enrich it (or "doctor it up", as my uncle Bud would say) with sautéed onions, garlic, basil and oregano. Similarly, bechamel is boring white sauce, but add some cheese, and you've got mornay, and that makes the BEST mac & cheese. [I have to thank my mother for teaching me how to make bechamel at a very early age, for the express purpose of mac & cheese.] (Add an egg yolk to mornay and you've got alfredo. It's like mixing colors. Or changing the beat to turn a waltz to a rhumba. Or something.)

Usually Silvia and Tashana work together, alongside Jordan and I, but today they told us that they were switching partners. Turned out that they're both feeling a bit under the weather, so they wanted partners who could help them out. Tashana is an avid student, but insecure. Not sure what she's tasting. Very polite. We made bearnaise together, which was optional today, because she missed class yesterday and didn't have a chance to make hollandaise. Bearnaise is hollandaise flavored with tarragon. Cha cha cha.

Tomorrow we have our knife skills test. Jordan has been practicing with his santoku and said that it's far easier to use than our chef's knife, but Chef burst his bubble and said that the santoku is off limits for the test. Despite the high visibility of santokus lately (virtually every manufacturer now carries them), and Rachael Ray's enthusiastic endorsement of it for all kinds of cutting, especially for vegetables, Chef Joseph says we're to use it for "raw fish, and nothing else." He's old school. That's why we're paying the big bucks and going to class every day, instead of spending fifteen months lying on the couch, watching the Food Network.